E-Book Startup Oyster Hires Jeannie Mun As Its First CFO – Jeannie Mun, formerly of MediaMath and Operative, is now CFO of Oyster, which demonstrates the seriousness with which the company is approaching a successful model for the subscription ebook service. That Barry McCarthy, CFO of Netflix, is also going ... more >
Harper Lee, Author of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ Is to Publish a Second Novel – News of the upcoming Harper Lee release burned through the internet yesterday, announced as it was via Lee’s lawyer and literary agent, complete with prepared quote about how happy Lee was to have this book ... more >
Oxford University Press reportedly barred pigs and anything pork-related from children’s book – Although the headlines for this story are pretty sensationalized, but it’s actually a pretty interesting issue. Tossing aside the usual claims of “political correctness,” the heart of this story is the tension between artistic freedom/free speech and ... more >
How the e-retailers keep us spending – With another big US shopping day ahead of us (New Year’s Day), this is an interesting piece on how online retailers have been moving in the direction of globalizing local celebrations, holidays, or traditional spending days (e.g. Black Friday) to capture the global ... more >
Children’s fuels 2014 growth in US – The Association of American Publishers have released their numbers regarding what is and isn’t selling in US publishing. In addition to the boom represented by kid lit, audiobooks are on the rise (26.2%) and hardcovers saw a very minor decrease (0.3%). Ebook revenue ... more >
Twitpic is shutting down – I am of two minds about this news: first, I’m sad that Twitpic is going away, because it was, for me, one of the easiest to use and least demanding/intrusive applications for use with Twitter. And second, I’m pretty damn curious about what it’s planning ... more >